About ClubPal
Built by volunteers who run a club, not by a corporate software vendor guessing what one needs. We know the spreadsheets, the WhatsApp groups, and the Sunday morning cash tins, because we've lived them.
“We use ClubPal to run our own club too, so when something's clunky for you, it's clunky for us.”
Our story
From a committee table to a full platform
ClubPal was first conceived in 2018 by its founder, Richard Mercer. After more than 20 years in the software industry, and several years sitting on the committee of his local triathlon club, he kept running into the same problem from both sides: there was a real gap in the market for tools built specifically for small, volunteer-run community clubs.
At the time, the club was piecing things together from whatever was closest to hand: an event-entry platform doing double duty for membership renewals, bank transfers for kit and social events, and a physical sheet of paper with an envelope of cash to collect names for swim sessions. Everyone knew it needed to modernise and go digital, but the options on the market were either clunky, built for a completely different kind of organisation, or trying to force square pegs into round holes. So ClubPal was born: software actually designed around how a volunteer committee runs a club, not adapted from something else.
Since those early days we've come a long way, now offering a complete club management platform, memberships, sessions, bookings, payments, communications, and more, and we're adding and improving features all the time. This is still a company born out of a love of giving back to the community, and we live by that today. We know the people using our platform are volunteers giving up their own limited time, often unpaid, often juggling it around a full-time job, so we try never to waste it.
We also use ClubPal ourselves. Richard and the wider team are still active members of the clubs we belong to, running our own memberships, sessions, and payments through the same platform we build, so we feel the same friction our clubs do the moment something doesn't quite work. We welcome feedback to grow and improve the platform, and we love hearing the stories of how we're making life a little easier for committees. We're not a faceless corporate company, we're just like you, trying to get things done as easily as possible.
What started with one triathlon club has grown a long way since. Today ClubPal supports all kinds of clubs, from our roots in triathlon and running, to canoeing, netball, dance, fencing, volleyball, and plenty more we couldn't have predicted when we started.